Vegan Footsoldier is Incorrect: Short-Term Decline of Veganism, the Stats.
28 July 2019 [link youtube]
Vegan Footsoldier neither showed a sincere interest in the quantitative side of the argument, nor in the qualitative side. I hope that his video (misleading and false as it may be) will encourage people to consider the actual opinions I put forth in my video (of just a few hours ago!) rather than taking it as a pretext to ignore a series of important points and considerations. The video that started this conversation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNnlQGYKH3w
Youtube Automatic Transcription
there was a time when there were many
different vegan news and commentary YouTube channels who might respond to a story such as the one I uploaded I think less than 12 hours ago but today there are fewer and fewer one of the very few remaining is a guy named vegan foot soldier and he means well but in his response he is both incorrect in terms of the data he presents and he's also very misleading in terms of the conclusions he draws and the generalizations that he speaks in terms of so one of his prominent examples in his response to my video or I might say his rebuttal is that he suggests that you know well it's true that the total number of viewers represented by channels like freelee and durianrider and vegan gains it's true that the examples I use show a dramatic decline in the order of more than 10 million more than 10 million viewers leaving this genre or leaving this ecosystem but he suggests to you optimistically there are other YouTube channels that are really successful and that are really growing during the same period of time and his main example is fully raw Christina so this is false in terms of the specific data being invoked and it's also misleading in terms of the conclusions or generalizations he comes to the YouTube channel for fully raw Christina does not contradict my hypothesis her channel affirms it it's a further example of the same phenomenon in October of 2016 you can see she had 2.6 million views per month and that has declined dramatically to about zero point six million at present now my thesis is not that that just reflects her personal artistic failure or her personal creative failure I think it reflects an overall decline in the number of viewers in this genre in this category an overall decline of interest which is consistent with what the Google trend data shows the numerous other direct and indirect signs we all have that we've had at least one year of serious decline now a comparison here would be between someone who claims well every year there were a few rock stars and there were a few dancehall artists and a few rap artists in many different genres of music sometimes one musician is famous and popularised owns another as and you can't generalize about the decline of a genre of music just on the basis of individual success well that is true but you can look at trend data that really shows you that yes by 2017 as this article says the statistics are really clear that the whole genre the whole category of guitar based music the whole category of rock-and-roll music really has declined in other genres like hip-hop music had become more popular so we're not just talking about the fact that today it's less popular for people to look at fully rock Christina and more popular for people to look at Mattie limb burner here or comparing freely to someone else when you look at the total numbers even if you look at the numbers of those specific channels a decline of 12 million people with Frehley would not be compensated for by an increase of 2 million with Faliro Christina but in fact as I've just shown fully raw Christina is also not increasing she is decreasing most likely because she is exactly struggling to succeed in the same genre in the same ecosystem in a situation where the total level of interest in vegan content has declined now this is not the only sense in which the data he presents is misleading and false footsoldiers comparison the stock market is false for many reasons number one we're not talking about the cumulative increase in the value of an investment or an asset or a stock number two the actual jerk he shows is wildly irrelevant he talks are quite a long time about Bitcoin values it's totally irrelevant to the situation and then the actual chart he does show from Google Trends data about the the word veganism he's generated this incorrectly you cannot have Google Trends set to world you must set it to an english-speaking country such as the United States of America Canada or is going to show you in a moment England now here again this is basically the same chart you saw on my channel before this is the data for the United States of America over five years even if everything footsoldiers said were true and accurate which it is not he sits what much of what he says is false but even if it were true inaccurate a two-year period of decline would not be insignificant we'd still be able to look at this period of five years and say well within this five year puréed you had three years of increase and then two years of declined that can be something significant and I set out all the reasons whether it is declining interest in veganism so here's the United States over five years and here's the United States over ten years this is not a cumulative value it's not the case that I'm earning dividends year after year from buying something in the stock market over five years in the United States again you see that recent decline and on the ten-year chart it looks even more recent and more sharp now you cannot generate data for the whole world from this interface because the whole world contains India and China and parts of Europe where they don't speak English if you want to use Google Trends data or the different word tracking data that Google generates it is very language specific it's very sensitive to the language so you cannot do a world based search for veganism and treat that as meaningful human data which is what he did I think that's just an error on his part he just didn't think about it that oh if I'm including India and China and a lot of other places we're basically gonna be masking the trend and showing a kind of meaningless chart but guess where else they speak English here is jolly old England and look at that ten-year trend so between 2009 and 2017 a big big increase in interest but now a very sharp trend just recently in 2019 this is much more dramatic looking at the chart for England than looking at the chart for the United States now look guys I am NOT opposed to optimism I think it's great to look at the data and say we can overcome this we can do better but I already said my argument very clearly in the video I already made if your idea of the future of veganism is the we're gonna have a best-selling book year after year after year if your idea of the future of veganism is that we're gonna have a hit documentary movie year after year after year and that that's going to be sustainable or that's going to continue to grow I think that is unrealistic and silly it's not a meaningful basis for for optimism of the future of the movement now the other thing I was trying to emphasize is precisely the point that footsoldier chooses to miss in the conclusion of his video that investing in the development of packaged products is very very different from people investing their time and their money in real world activism on a charitable basis on a level of political organizations lobbying for government change you you cannot look at this as a stock market statistic you have to look at this ultimately we're looking at the market for people getting involved in self-sacrificing and altruistic action we're not looking at the return on investment for producing new packaged products [Music]
different vegan news and commentary YouTube channels who might respond to a story such as the one I uploaded I think less than 12 hours ago but today there are fewer and fewer one of the very few remaining is a guy named vegan foot soldier and he means well but in his response he is both incorrect in terms of the data he presents and he's also very misleading in terms of the conclusions he draws and the generalizations that he speaks in terms of so one of his prominent examples in his response to my video or I might say his rebuttal is that he suggests that you know well it's true that the total number of viewers represented by channels like freelee and durianrider and vegan gains it's true that the examples I use show a dramatic decline in the order of more than 10 million more than 10 million viewers leaving this genre or leaving this ecosystem but he suggests to you optimistically there are other YouTube channels that are really successful and that are really growing during the same period of time and his main example is fully raw Christina so this is false in terms of the specific data being invoked and it's also misleading in terms of the conclusions or generalizations he comes to the YouTube channel for fully raw Christina does not contradict my hypothesis her channel affirms it it's a further example of the same phenomenon in October of 2016 you can see she had 2.6 million views per month and that has declined dramatically to about zero point six million at present now my thesis is not that that just reflects her personal artistic failure or her personal creative failure I think it reflects an overall decline in the number of viewers in this genre in this category an overall decline of interest which is consistent with what the Google trend data shows the numerous other direct and indirect signs we all have that we've had at least one year of serious decline now a comparison here would be between someone who claims well every year there were a few rock stars and there were a few dancehall artists and a few rap artists in many different genres of music sometimes one musician is famous and popularised owns another as and you can't generalize about the decline of a genre of music just on the basis of individual success well that is true but you can look at trend data that really shows you that yes by 2017 as this article says the statistics are really clear that the whole genre the whole category of guitar based music the whole category of rock-and-roll music really has declined in other genres like hip-hop music had become more popular so we're not just talking about the fact that today it's less popular for people to look at fully rock Christina and more popular for people to look at Mattie limb burner here or comparing freely to someone else when you look at the total numbers even if you look at the numbers of those specific channels a decline of 12 million people with Frehley would not be compensated for by an increase of 2 million with Faliro Christina but in fact as I've just shown fully raw Christina is also not increasing she is decreasing most likely because she is exactly struggling to succeed in the same genre in the same ecosystem in a situation where the total level of interest in vegan content has declined now this is not the only sense in which the data he presents is misleading and false footsoldiers comparison the stock market is false for many reasons number one we're not talking about the cumulative increase in the value of an investment or an asset or a stock number two the actual jerk he shows is wildly irrelevant he talks are quite a long time about Bitcoin values it's totally irrelevant to the situation and then the actual chart he does show from Google Trends data about the the word veganism he's generated this incorrectly you cannot have Google Trends set to world you must set it to an english-speaking country such as the United States of America Canada or is going to show you in a moment England now here again this is basically the same chart you saw on my channel before this is the data for the United States of America over five years even if everything footsoldiers said were true and accurate which it is not he sits what much of what he says is false but even if it were true inaccurate a two-year period of decline would not be insignificant we'd still be able to look at this period of five years and say well within this five year puréed you had three years of increase and then two years of declined that can be something significant and I set out all the reasons whether it is declining interest in veganism so here's the United States over five years and here's the United States over ten years this is not a cumulative value it's not the case that I'm earning dividends year after year from buying something in the stock market over five years in the United States again you see that recent decline and on the ten-year chart it looks even more recent and more sharp now you cannot generate data for the whole world from this interface because the whole world contains India and China and parts of Europe where they don't speak English if you want to use Google Trends data or the different word tracking data that Google generates it is very language specific it's very sensitive to the language so you cannot do a world based search for veganism and treat that as meaningful human data which is what he did I think that's just an error on his part he just didn't think about it that oh if I'm including India and China and a lot of other places we're basically gonna be masking the trend and showing a kind of meaningless chart but guess where else they speak English here is jolly old England and look at that ten-year trend so between 2009 and 2017 a big big increase in interest but now a very sharp trend just recently in 2019 this is much more dramatic looking at the chart for England than looking at the chart for the United States now look guys I am NOT opposed to optimism I think it's great to look at the data and say we can overcome this we can do better but I already said my argument very clearly in the video I already made if your idea of the future of veganism is the we're gonna have a best-selling book year after year after year if your idea of the future of veganism is that we're gonna have a hit documentary movie year after year after year and that that's going to be sustainable or that's going to continue to grow I think that is unrealistic and silly it's not a meaningful basis for for optimism of the future of the movement now the other thing I was trying to emphasize is precisely the point that footsoldier chooses to miss in the conclusion of his video that investing in the development of packaged products is very very different from people investing their time and their money in real world activism on a charitable basis on a level of political organizations lobbying for government change you you cannot look at this as a stock market statistic you have to look at this ultimately we're looking at the market for people getting involved in self-sacrificing and altruistic action we're not looking at the return on investment for producing new packaged products [Music]